digital digs

"The" Writing Process begins with Google

I was an undergrad in the pre-Internet days (late 80s, early 90s). At Rutgers even the library catalog was still paper-based in those days (i.e. a card catalog)... if you haven't ever seen a card catalog, I suggest that you google it. I'm sure there were a lot of books in that library, and paper versions of journals: I imagine there was more paper in that library then than there is today.

I remember writing an essay in my composition course in response to having read Plato's allegory of the cave (so an excerpt from The Republic). As I recall, I spun a couple pages of BS about the reading in relation to John Lennon's Imagine, all written on an electronic typewriter (and yes, you can google that too). But let's say I didn't have a good grasp on Plato after half-sleeping through my 8am MWF class. I could go to the instructor/TA or a classmate, I guess. If I went to the library, I could look in the subject catalog for Plato and see what books there were. I could go to the reference area and look up Plato in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I could try finding some journal article on Plato by looking through all the paper bound annual bibliographies (the paper equivalent of searching JSTOR). Or my personal favorite, I could look in the paper Periodical Index, which might lead me to some microfiche copies of newspapers or magazines. If I was really desparate I could try to find a librarian.

Not surprisingly I spent very little time in the library. My English major was almost entirely "New Critical," so it was all about close readings of primary texts. I recall writing one researched paper as an undergrad for English. I believe I wrote two for my History major. But really most of my classes were far too large to permit much writing anyway; it was mostly in-class essay exams. However, setting my experience aside, the point I want to make is that in the 80s, when our contemporary disciplinary notions of "the" writing process were being developed, research was difficult and time-consuming. In the example above, I probably would have found my way to an encyclopedia or maybe some intro to philosophy text to help me understand what I had read, but I doubt I would have found much conversation about it. At the time I doubt I even knew that the allegory of the cave was part of a larger text, let alone what that text was about or its historical-cultural context. As a result, invention was a far more internal process, and this is what we classically see with the writing process: freewriting, brainstorming, and so on are all largely internalized heuristics where writers draw upon their own memories and perhaps the text that is immediately before them. 

Today, writing begins with Google or more broadly with a socially mediated search of the web. For example, I was working on a book chapter yesterday, and I got to a point where I wanted to write about research into working memory and writing. In the good-old, bad-old days, I would have driven to the library and probably spent at least one full day walking around the stacks, looking through books, photocopying journal articles, and, of course, filling out interlibrary loan forms. It would have taken days, if not weeks, to get my answer. And at this point, I wasn't even sure if this was a direction I wanted or needed to take in my chapter. I did a little Google searching to refine some of my search terms, to see how the conversation operated. I went to Comppile, because I knew that was a good database of research in writing, and I found some articles there that were available online. I also did some searching on cognitive science and its relation to activity theory, which eventually led me to some journal articles that were available through my library's online databases. So I found a dozen decent references, which I downloaded as PDFs and quickly scanned while searching for specific key terms. 

In short, I was able to write and research on a very tight recursive loop, where invention and research were tied to an already existing big picture of where the chapter was going. Writing in this way takes a fair amount of experience to do well. It's the thing I have most learned to do through writing this blog. However, inexperienced writers use a version of this process as well. As instructors we already know that students turn quickly to Google when given an assignment. I often hear this fact bemoaned. We bemoan it because we have a different, antiquated notion of how to teach invention in the writing process. We also worry that it leads to plagiarism. And there is no doubt that plagiarism is a concern, but it is partly a concern because we need to help students understand how to use Google for invention.

For me, this is part of a larger picture of recognizing writing as a networked activity of distributed cognition involving technologies, organizations, and other nonhuman objects (as well as other humans). The network in which college students write has obviously changed a great deal in 25 years, but we still teach them the same basic process. I've been reviewing a lot of textbooks recently, and some rhetorics are making a move toward changing their perspective. However I imagine that many are hamstrung by the expectations of writing instructors (or at least the way publishers imagine those instructors). It's hard to steer the giant aircraft carrier of compostion on a national scale. Indeed it requires a complex network of distributed cogntiion, as Edwin Hutchins famously explored. And if you don't get that reference you can google it (or spend a day at the library, where the reference librarian will probably look it up online for you if you get stuck).

MOOCs and the general education economy

Steve Krause writes that the recent EDC-MOOC (in which we both participated) was "meh." I agree. But you know what else was meh for me? School. K-12. Undergrad. Grad. meh. meh. meh. I was never very good at playing the role of the student. Obviously my grades were fine, so I could play the game well enough, but I never found coursework particulary interesting or relevant. I could offer you a litany of the mediocre experiences of my undergraduate education, but I doubt that would be of much interest. However, I will say that if a MOOC amounts to a curated list of readings, some lectures, a largely unsupervised discussion among students, and a testing mechanism, then this isn't really any different from what I had in most of my courses as an undergraduate. The only real difference would be that my unsupervised discussion happened FTF with friends I was taking the course with rather than 1000s of people online. I learned that I could get decent grades with a very minimal amount of investment. I didn't value school and hence it wasn't valuable to me. I can see that. But I can also see that I put my investment into other places, other kinds of environments. I learned a great deal working in a small business in the computer industry, composing music and building a recording studio, and writing independently of school.

So from my perspective, so what if MOOCs are meh? The whole enterprise is meh. There's no doubt that there are plenty of students who have been so heavily institutionalized that they can't succeed in a MOOC. They are like those lifers in prison who find themselves paroled and don't know how to live on the outside. And we know there's an economic element to this as kids from poor school districts get the most regimented, institutionalized education and are typically the most at-risk for success in college (and even moreso online or in a MOOC). The students who will be most successful in MOOCs are ones for whom school was only ever one learning site among many. They will be able to jump through the inane MOOC hoops and get on with their lives, confident that what one learns today in a MOOC doesn't really matter anyway. It's just a tiny part of a much vaster learning ecosystem. Of course that's hardly a ringing endorsement for MOOCs, but they don't have to be great. They're free. I have a daughter in high school now. Do I really want to pay for her to sit in general education courses for two or three semesters? Not really. I'll draw up a reading list and she can read it over the summer. If she has questions, she can find the answers online. And she'll learn much more on her own than she would sitting through some lectures and taking some bubble test. Maybe she can even take a MOOC. 

Clearly though, universities depend on general education courses to make their economic model go. Either they cram 100s of students into a room or they pay adjuncts minimal pay to teach the course. Or, like in English, they float their grad programs with TA-ships. None of those strategies are ringing endorsements from my perspective as the one paying the tuition dollars. And that's not to say that those adjuncts might not be better teachers than some of the professors. Few of these folks have ever received any pedagogical training. It's just to point out that universities seem to look the low costs of general education courses to balance out the high costs of other kinds of courses that are smaller in size, more technology intensive perhaps, and are taught by faculty earning more money, especially in the professional schools.  It's even more crucial from the perspective of the humanities. Without general education, humanities departments are tiny and lose the means to offer graduate students TAships, which means tiny grad programs as well. 

So it's not that MOOCs are great. Better-designed MOOCs might be on the horizon, but the ones we have already shine an uncomfortable light on general education. The basic premises of general education are that 1) every college student should have some baseline introductory knowledge that stretches from science and math to social science and humanities, and 2) a gen ed curriculum is the best way to deliver that knowledge. I don't know if either of those premises still works. Certainly #2 does not. Today it seems more relevant to teach the students how to fish rather than to give them the fish in a 50 minute lecture, especially since the 50-minute lecture is free online anyway.

The upshot of this is that the humanities need to start developing a new economic model, one that will not depend on 1000s of undergraduates taking composition or western civ or whatever. Could we create a better version of general education? Sure. I've talked about that before. But I'm not sure that even that will make a difference. The crucial thing we need to do is reinvent ourselves to connect with the values and concerns of our students and our culture. The MOOC, meh or not, means we can't imagine that we can just plod along as we always have.

playing the regimes of attraction

Last weekend, we drove down to DC for a soccer tournament in which my son's team was participating. During the 16-hour trip there and back, we listened to an audiobook, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It's a sci-fi novel set in a dystopian future where the main characters spend most of their time in a virtual internet/game world called the OASIS (the ontologically anthropocentric sensory immersive simulation). The novel's plot is largely an easter egg hunt with the prize being ownership of the Oasis itself. The hunt, developed by the now-deceased creator of the Oasis James Halliday, is filled with the nerdy 80s trivia that Halliday loved. I won't say it is a great literary achievement, but it was fun to listen to while driving through central PA. Elsewhere this weekend, I was also revisiting Levi Bryant's Democracy of Objects, which I've been teaching in my Speculative Realism graduate seminar, and we spent some time on Monday discussing Bryant's concept of regimes of attraction. 

This may seem like apples and oranges to you, but these are two sides of the concept of virtuality that I explored in The Two Virtuals. Briefly, as we know, the Deleuzian virtual is a monistic substrate. As Bryant writes, "Deleuze's constant references to the virtual as the pre-individual suggests this reading as well, for it implies a transition from an undifferentiated state to a differenciated individual. If the virtual is pre-individual, then it cannot be composed of discrete individual unities or substances. Here the individual would be an effect of the virtual, not primary being itself." The digital virtual is nothing like this. Perhaps virtual reality appears to be made of some monistic malleable materiality but it is, of course, code: ones and zeros, or even better, voltage intensities across a circuit. Deleuze's real virtual lies beneath all that even further. In Democracy of Objects, Bryant undertakes a motivated reading of Deleuze, identifying particular passages where he leans in a different direction, toward a more pluralistic, less monistic, virtuality, which eventually leads Bryant toward his concept of virtual proper being.

This got me wondering if virtual proper being might not be an ontology that is in some respects closer to the way that VR functions, or is imagined to function in a novel like Ready Player One. Bryant writes that

The virtual proper being of an object is what makes an object properly an object. It is that which constitutes an object as a difference engine or generative mechanism. However, no one nor any other thing ever encounters an object qua its virtual proper being, for the substance of an object is perpetually withdrawn or in excess of any of its manifestations.

And then later, he adds, "The virtual proper being of an object is its endo-structure, the manner in which it embodies differential relations and attractors or singularities defining a vector field or field of potentials within a substance." In the move from a common substrate to these virtual/hidden individual "generative mechanisms," this seems to me more like the generative mechanisms behind artificial life. Certainly it would be fair to say that the algorithms that drive such objects are only ever simulations or models of the singularities and attractors that operate virtually. I don't want to take this analogy too far. However, I wonder: if we could hypothesize some extra-dimensional position outside of the virtual-actual ontological circuit Bryant describes, would that position offer us a vantage that might be analogous to the human user examining the codes and manifestations of sofware objects in VR?

In any case, the development of virtual spaces offers a useful way to think about how regimes of attraction might operate. Bryant describes these regimes as follows:

Regimes of attraction should thus be thought as interactive networks or, as Timothy Morton has put it, meshes that play an affording and constraining role with respect to the local manifestations of objects. Depending on the sorts of objects or systems being discussed, regimes of attraction can include physical, biological, semiotic, social, and technological components. Within these networks, hierarchies or sub-networks can emerge that constrain the local manifestations available to other nodes or entities within the network.

In short, regimes of attraction place external limits on how the virtual proper being of an object might manifest itself. As it already stands, every object has an endo-structure that already places limits on what it might be (otherwise, virtual proper being would be the same as monism). However those manifestations are further limited by exo-relations, which form the regimes of attraction. As a result of this intersection, objects are neither entirely free to mutate in any fashion nor are they overdetermined by their context. To think about this within the analogy of a virtual reality space, one might say that any object that one creates will have an endo-structure that limits its operation and possibilities for manifesting. For example, Bryant uses the extended example of a blue coffee mug to talk about the mugs power "to blue" and how that manifests itself differently depending on regimes of attraction such as available light sources and the sensory capacities of the objects perceiving the mug. The same sort of mechanic would operate in a virtual world, just as most virtual worlds have game engines that govern things like "gravity." Those engines are part of the endo-structure of objects. The fact that one (or one's avatar) finds herself on a large planet with a particular gravitational field (or a virtual version of such) is then part of the regime of attraction that manifests your feet on the ground and constrains movement in specific ways. Virtual worlds often work this way, even though clearly they don't have to. 

Ready Player One offers a peculiar vision of how the endo-structure of a VR world might develop out of a pre-existing set of regimes of attraction. That is, if we were to imagine, for a second, that someone actually created the Oasis, at the outset its limits would be defined by things like available computing technologies, processing power, programming languages, etc.: in other words, the material substrate on which any VR world would be built. The Oasis in the novel becomes further shaped by its creator's obsession with the 1980s: Dungeons and Dragons, early video games, computers, sci-fi novels, anime... the whole geek lexicon. This obession becomes built into the mechanics of the Oasis itself, along with those other technological elements. Parzival, the novel's protagonist, navigates the Oasis through his deep research into this culture.

How do we want to think about a VR world as a real object? We've seen this conversation among OOO folks about whether or not Popeye is real. In OOO terms, for an object to be real it must be able to exist independent of external relations. So a statue of Popeye is real. However, there is also something like an idea of Popeye that can be trademarked: is that a real object? Can something that is symbolic or encoded be real, independent of its local manifestations in a book or on a screen? Perhaps. So, for example, if a character in World of Warcraft finds a magical sword, which she can sell or trade, even for US dollars: is that sword a real object?

I would say that one potential error to avoid here is in imagining that virtual worlds are separate from the "real world." They aren't worlds inside of worlds. A digital photograph is as real as a printed photograph. An ebook is as real as a printed book. A digital movie file is as real, as material, as a movie on a reel. Virtual characters have a material manifestation as well. They take up physical space on a hard drive somewhere. They should not be mistaken for their local manifestations on a computer screen, though it is only within the particular regimes of attraction of that software and hardware that they become viewable as characters. Otherwise they are just data files.

Maybe this is a good analogy for a pluralist virtuality, like virtual proper being. Without the proper regime of attraction, virtual beings are unreadable, inaccessible. With the right regime, they become manifest in particular ways, not their true form of course, but a form that can relate and acquire agency. That would suggest though that virtual being can be altered by altering its local manifestation, which is something we already know in OOO right? Virtual beings cannot directly interact; only their local manifestations (for Bryant) or sensual objects (for Harman) can be encountered. But real objects (their virtual/withdrawn states) can be destroyed through these interactions; there must be feedback. If they can be destroyed then it makes sense that they can also be altered without destroying them--not just altering their local manifestations but their virtual/withdrawn states as well, while allowing the object to still be the same object.... just different. In other words, we can paint Bryant's blue coffee mug yellow, and it will no longer manifest blueness. It will lose that virtual power. It's virtual proper being will be altered. And yet it is still the same mug. I don't see why that should be a problem. We can have a discussion about how much change is required to make something into a different object, but that's for another time. 

What this indicates to me is that if we think about a pluralist rather than a monist virtuality, then we create an ontology where the particulars of an object's virtual dimension are alterable through its local manifestations, which in turn are alterable through the regimes of attraction in which it emerges. This creates a condition in which we can proceed experimentally in devising different regimes for the purpose of shaping virtual being. Our ability to know the results of those experiments might always be limited but the principle that such mutations are possible seems to make sense. 

Do MOOCs need guilds? #edcmooc

Life interfered a litle last week, so I got off-track on this MOOC, so today I will be responding to both week 3 and 4 of the eLearning and Digital Culture MOOC. These weeks deal with the topic of posthumanism... so something on which I've written a great deal. The instructors also offer up transhumanism. I can see the point of comparision on some surface level, but, at least in my view, these are two very different things and the comparision might lead to some serious misunderstanding of posthumanism. I'll get to those details in a moment, but I want to arrive there through a consideration of this question: do MOOCs need guilds?

What do I mean by that? While I am not a player of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, I am aware that much of the activity in these games is carried out by collectives of players known as guilds. Many of the missions in these games require the concerted effort of 20 or more players, so a fair amount of coordination is required both during the live event of adventuring and in-between. I realize I am an ususual participant in this MOOC as I am operating more as an observer than as someone who has specific learning goals. However I started thinking that serious MOOCers might benefit from being part of a small (20-50 person) group of participants who would commit not only to a single MOOC course but might undertake multiple courses over time. Different participants might offer different skills. For exmaple, some would have more or less time to devote to a particular course and bring more or less expertise to the content. As such their roles might change over time, sometimes being more like a mentor and sometimes playing the students. Members could divide the work of investigating different parts of the course and reporting back to the group. 

I suppose one's response to this suggestion might have something to do with how one views the ethical practices of learning. Do we really want students taking courses as a group, collaborating and strategizing independing of the instructor? Or do we ultimately want students to be independent in some fundamental way that would make a guild-type strategy unethical.

In part, this also has to do with how one envisions learning on a MOOC. In an email list discussion I had a few weeks back on the potential of a writing MOOC, I suggested that learning in a MOOC couldn't simply be measured by what individual students had learned, that instead the pedagogical activity of the MOOC needs to recognize what the collective network learns. This is not a spurious suggestion. Part of the premise here is that IF MOOCs are the "future of education" then that is partly because the future of professional labor and citizenship will take place through this kind of collective, networked activity where expertise is not so much about what is inside your head but how well you can connect your head to a larger network of cognition. 

Of course this brings to the matter of trans- and posthumanism. Transhumanism, at least as it is represented for the course in this article, is a political position that advocates for technoscientific experimentation and a legal system that promotes wide freedoms to adopt technological innovations. Posthumanism though is not well-represented, even though the instructors offer this introduction to a collection titled Posthumanism, which largely conflates posthumanism with poststructuralism. Unlike transhumanism, posthumanism is not about something that will or might be made to happen through technoscience. It is not even something that did happen, as in once upon a time we were humanist-type humans and now we are posthuman. Instead, posthumanism is about reconsidering what humans always already were/are. Basically, even though poststructuralism is certainly a critique of humanism, it does not do what posthumanism seeks to do in its attempt to understand the intersection of humans and nonhumans.

As a posthumanist, at least my version of it, one would look at MOOCs as networks of distributed cognition (which work with varying degrees of success). While the apparent goal of each course is mastering the content, the other, less obvious goal is teaching users to participate in a particular kind of information network, where knowledge is developed through a certain range of techniques. Of course we could say the same thing about the 20th-century industrial classroom. So, for example, 20th-century academic writing (e.g. first-year composition) was about

• close reading of print texts
• using a print library
• writing a linear text (e.g. thesis statements, paragraph development, etc.)
• working independently.

The 21st-century learning environemnt and digital composition is perhaps more akin to the wiki page

• distant reading of digital resources
• accessing information over multiple networks
• producing digital media artifacts with multiple audiences and access points
• working collectively

I don't mean to suggest that 20th century skills disappear, but I do believe they must operate within the context of the 21st century environment. For example, we still need to read closely. However, close reading is no longer enough and must be integrated with an ability to handle more information than one person can be expected to read in the time alloted for any given project. There will still be linear texts but they will not operate as they once did.

MOOCs can teach students to operate in these new environements. However I do think something like a guild approach would be useful in making that happen. 

NCTE's 21st century curriculum #edcmooc

Surprisingly, English teachers from K-12 through higher education are not a particularly forward-thinking bunch. Shocking right? While schoolmarm grammarian is uncharitable, it's probably closer to the mark than future-oriented innovator. So when the National Council of Teachers of English publishes a framework for 21st century literacy curriculum that is entirely focused on digital matters, one could almost say this means that one no longer needs to be forward-thinking to recognize digital literacy as a primary site of English education.

I want to combine this with a generally more future-oriented institutional document, the New Media Consortium's Horizon report. The full report isn't out yet but they have identified the 6 technological trends:

Technology to Watch	Time-to-Adoption Horizon
Massively Open Online Courses Tablet Computing	One Year or Less
Big Data and Learning Analytics Game-Based Learning	Two to Three Years
3D Printing Wearable Technology	Four to Five Year

I think the MOOC and the tablet are fairly obvious, which they should be given the time-to-adoption horizon. They been reporting some version of game-based learning and 3-d printing for some time, so I'm not sure about how those will come about, how broad their impact will be, or what the time frame will be. However I think big data and wearable technology are good bets.

I don't know if the particular brand of MOOCs we see with Coursera will be around in 5 years, but I'd be willing to bet that there will be millions of "students" taking open, online courses in 2020. I put students in scare quotes because students suggests, for some, college credits, and I'm not sure what the relationship will be between open courses and credits. What I do know is that these massive, networked environments will alter the way we learn (and work and socialize). I know this because they already have but that trend is only going to intensify.

What NCTE recognizes is that English should be the means by which such literacy is acquired (at least in the US, which is the nation in "National Council"). To that I say, "good luck." Good luck providing this professional development for existing teachers, who are not prepared to do this. Good luck finding university English departments with faculty to provide this literacy to the general population of college students, let alone educate preservice K-12 teachers or graduate students who will become university faculty. Good luck finding English departments who even remotely view digital literacy as a subject that even marginally concerns them, let alone one that would be central to their curriculum in the way that print literacy is now. As I suggested above, I think you'd have better luck selling the average college English department on becoming grammar-centric than you would on becoming digital-centric. 

Now if you think I'm just trolling on my own website, well, you might be right. But the truth is that if this was 2003 and a department recognized that digital literacy was going to become the issue that might make or break their disciplinary future, then by now they might have four or five digital scholars hired and a couple tenured. Maybe they'd be in a position to deliver this content today. But few departments did that. This means the transition is likely to be rocky. 

Here's my point of comparison. In the mid-19th century, English departments studied oratory and philology: two things contemporary English faculty no little about. Why did English split itself off from speech? Speech still survives, in a way. Most universities have some public speaking course, and speech departments evolved into communication studies. Without wanting to sound techno-determinist, the second industrial revolution had a significant hand in that transformation. I look upon print-centric literary and rhetorical studies in the same way. In hindsight we might say that the 19th century transition took 3 or 4 decades. Things move a little faster now, but the truth is that 2020 will be 25 years after the rise of the modern Internet. 

the double bind of open education #edcmooc

For week two of the eLearning and Digital Culture MOOC, one of the assignments is watching Gardner Campbell speak at Open Ed 12 from last October. Here's the video:

One of Gardner's key points of reference is Gregory Bateson, specifically Ecologies of the Mind. Having been up and down the cybernetics business, Bateson is familiar to me from that angle, but my first encounter was through Deleuze and Guattari, right at the start of A Thousand Plateaus, where they write: "A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word "plateau" to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end."

This is perhaps not so far off from what Gardner is seeking in his use of Bateson: open education as a "continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities." However, there's a problem, as we all know. And it is a problem that Gardner, through Bateson, terms the double-bind. The double-bind is when one is giving two conflicting messages or goals to follow. My favorite example from the talk is the description of a blogging requirement and rubric from a syllabus. There's a long description of rules and procedures to follow and an extensive description of requirements... followed by the injunction to "be creative" and foster a community. This isn't meant to poke fun at the anonymous professor, because we are all in this double-bind. Bateson suggests that the responses to the double-bind take the form of paranoia (this is a trick), hebephrenia (screw it, let's get drunk), and catatonia (what?). Certainly these are the typical faculty responses I have seen to the double-bind of a university strategic plan (or online education) for that matter. So it's not just students. But what are we to do? If we have a syllabus, don't we need to have requirements and grade criteria? 

The central double-bind for digital literacy education--whether it is FTF, traditionally online, or open and online--is between the demand to reinvent/be creative and the expectation of meeting traditional standards. Gardner relates a story of one academic who responds to the idea of open online education by saying "it may be learning, but it's not academics." If that is true, it's because academics is tied to certification, and certification is tied to reaching specific, predetermined goals. I don't think anyone wants to do away with the practice of certification, especially for certain professions. In fact, the badges movement looks to expand the micro-certifications of academics (e.g. the course credit) into extra-institutional learning experiences. My inclination would be that we need to move in the opposite direction, distancing learning from certifying. But I don't see us doing that, in part because higher education is a research and certifying machine far more that it is a teaching and learning one. However just as importantly our student-customers want certification more than they want learning. They want jobs not an education. Are jobs and education mutually exclusive? No, but they overlap in rather impoverished ways, at least in the eyes of our students. As WPA I read through 1000s of FYC course evals each year. There is a running theme in those responses that no one should find surprising: students don't believe that a writing course is relevant to the education they are pursuing. Likely many of these comments come from prospective STEM majors, but also business, which makes up 1/5 of our student population.

I don't wish to romanticize open online education as Deleuzian plateau. However the idea of openness might imply eschewing the definition of specific culmination points or external ends: a problem for institutions (and students) who are more interested in external ends than self-vibrating intensities. When it comes down to it, I don't think faculty are all that interested in opennes either. Faculty are interested in replicating the closed systems that award them with expertise.

So, for example, a writing or digital composing MOOC is easy to imagine. DS106 digital storytelling is one. A writing MOOC with 40000 students could work without problem... as long as no certification is required, as long as the particular writing and the particular ends are not important. As long as it doesn't even matter if the students write or don't write, learn or don't learn. Of course the trick of good design would be to invite participation. But is this what the many students these MOOC's hope to attract want? Do they want "open education" or do they want "free certification"? (preferably with a minimum of work or learning).

This is the great double bind of open education: to reorient prospective students toward an open-ended education and away from the symbolic capital promised by higher ed. It's an interesting project but I wonder how it works for any of the people who are involved?

the monastic academy #edcmooc

We often see studies of technology adoption by college students, such as those done by Pew. We know from our own classrooms and walking the campus that Pew's statistics that 96% of undergrads have cell phone and 88% have laptops, that 92% of students have wireless connection on some device, are reflected in our own observations. The general adult population is 82%, 52%, and 57% respectively. I wonder what the stats would be for humanities faculty? Lower than undergrads I suspect, but I wonder if it would be lower than the average adult. I don't think anyone would be surprised to discover that humanities professors spend more time with traditional cultural/media activities than the average adult or student: reading print books; going to museums, public lectures, and libraries; listing to classical music, etc. And obviously one should be able to live one's life as one chooses, including in terms of online connection.

Given the nature of our profession however, particularly our professional freedoms, these personal choices then become professional ones. To a certain degree, all faculty have needed to come online in one way or another: library databases, email, online grading and student information, and to a lesser though still significant extent, course management systems. Clearly all faculty have internet access at least through their workplaces. But to what extent have we collectively embraced networked culture? Certainly not to the extent that we have embraced the modern culture that we continue to celebrate through our curriculum. 

Why is this an issue? Let's say, for example, that I didn't really care for reading books. I would assign books for my courses because that was expected, but I didn't live a life where books were personally valued. How successful do you think I would be teaching print literacy? Teaching with digital networks requires a kind of literacy derived from a significant level of immersion. This is, I think, a real stumbling block for our profession in facing up to this challenge. And it's not just one decision that is crucial here, and I would agree that one can become overly and unproductively immersed in the digital world, but here are a few examples:

• Not wanting a smartphone or other mobile device because one wishes to be disconnected
• Not wanting to be involved in social media of any kind because they are trivial
• Not taking seriously conversations that take place primarily via the web, because that's not where serious conversations happen
• Viewing digital cultural activities from gaming to YouTube to any kind of user-generated content as crass commercialism not worthy of serious attention, as a kind of anti-literate, anti-intellectual space
• Viewing connectivity as an intrusion of valuable cultural activity, in the classroom or elsewhere. 

Again, there are valid points of concern here and these are all acceptable individual decisions. I have no problem with someone living their life this way, but if one puts this all together then I think one ends up with a faculty member who is not well-suited to meet the challenges of preparing students to live in a world that the faculty member has renounced. 

In the eLearning MOOC we've been talking about this in terms of Prensky's digital immigrants and digital natives. In my view this is an unproductive and even damaging perspective. Again, as with the utopian/dystopian discourse, perhaps the concept is to move people away from these positions. Reading the course discussion, there are certainly people who have arrived familiar with these terms and unhappy with them. (I would imagine anyone who knows something about these matters knows this is not a productive kind of thinking. It's akin to starting a composition class with grammar instruction because that's what the students expect, even though as an instructor you know that's not the right direction.)

The immigrant/native business sets up a false dichotomy and reinforces an unnecessary conflict. If you identify the faculty as immigrants, then you are really taking a hostile position toward them. But more dangerously you are setting this up as a generational problem wherein the immigrant faculty can just say let the younger generation, the natives, do this work. But that's not what happens because this isn't about generations. It's about disciplinary culture. I have encountered plenty of mid-20s English doctoral students. Yes, many have cell phones and laptops and such, as you would expect. But very few see digital literacy or practices as part of their teaching or disciplinary work. Instead, they are adopting the cultural practices and values of their discipline, which is print-based. 

English departments have always claimed that they are place where people go to become better writers. I have never believed that. I think English attracts students who are already good writers, and I think a literary and print-based curriculum can teach students to read particular genres in particular ways and write literary criticism with its specific discourse. Increasingly though, what is taught is a kind of monastic practice, one that clearly prides itself on its removal from the discourses of the marketplace and the larger culture. There is nothing wrong with monasticism.... for monks. However it doesn't have broad appeal, though there will always be some students who want that experience. We can't expect that there will be a generational shift that will lead to some eventual change in this situation. "Generations" are broad enough and the academic job needs are small enough, that there will always be potential hires and grad students to replicate these disciplinary values, just as there will always be people willing to live lives as monks. 

And of course it's not just English departments. It's all of the humanities and perhaps beyond. That's just the corner of academia where I live. Ultimately, I think meeting the challenges of digita literacy will require university strategies for hiring and supporting faculty that work outside the disciplinary/departmental will to repetition. 

why utopian/dystopian thinking is wrong-headed #edcmooc

With some 40,000 others I have started on this Coursera MOOC on elearning and digital culture. The first unit deals with utopian and dystopian perspectives on technology. Is it really necessary to explain why this is not a worthwhile way to frame this conversation? If we brought someone from where I live in Western New York from 200 or 500 years ago, would they look upon our world as utopian? dystopian? or just hopelessly foreign? I am guessing they would find it both alienating and amazing. Many of the values they would have would simply not make sense in our world. While technologies do not determine culture, they clearly participate in shaping the world (both naturally and culturally if you wish to make those problematic distinctions). It would be naive to view technological development as a problem solving activity: necessity isn't always the mother of invention. Technologies do not lead toward utopia. Sometimes technologies solve problems, but I think they're more likely to make old problems irrelevant. Did the automobile "solve" a problem with transportation? Not exactly. Did the light bulb solve a problem of darkness? I guess, but it would be more accurate to say that electric illumination created a new human space with new human activities. Put in the broadest terms, we no longer have the problems that 18th-century Americans had; we have new ones.

When we think of the technologies that are the focus of this MOOC--the social web, mobile devices, etc.--did they solve problems? Were they designed with some utopian impluse? Maybe, partly. Most people don't imagine they are doing evil. We could say that technologies are market-driven, but we wouldn't want to mistakenly believe that the market overdetermines technology. As if the market were some uniform entity. As if the market were not capable of error. In my view it's more accurate to imagine technologies as participating in a discontinuous process whereby new activities are generated, activities among humans and nonhumans. Sometime these activities solve old problems, sometimes they make old problems obsolete without solving them, and sometimes they create new problems or reshape old problems. Given this frame, what seems like a better starting point for me is attempting to identify the functionality of these media technologies and the activities that arise from them. Out of that analysis one might begin to think about their situation in pedagogies. I don't think that's a strictly technical or rational process, though obviously some technical understanding is necessary. That said, it's more about investigating what people do and the myriad capacities that might emerge when humans and nonhumans interact.

In other words, I think the utopian/dystopian business is a bit of boondoggle. I realize that we often think of technologies in this way, so maybe its an attempt to find a broad piece of common ground. OK. But as a teacher I would not want to spend so much time confirming a bias that I had to later undo.

This brings me to the MOOC itself. I'm very early into the experience. The typical thing users say is that they feel overwhelmed. That's not exactly the word I would use. The reading/viewing material is pretty light. There are a lot of potential discussion topics in Coursera, along with Twitter feeds, a Google Plus group, etc. etc. So it's a little hard to figure out where to find one's audience. I feel like my audience is here and connected to the MOOC through the Twitter hashtag. I will post in Coursera some, but I do face a rhetorical quandry there. I'm not sure what the point is. Maybe I'll find out. 

university futures

Probably not a commodity you want to invest in, right? Nevertheless, UB with a new provost and president is engaged in the familiar process of developing its strategic plan. It's difficult to imagine this as anything other than a cynical process: politicians and corporations want a skilled labor pool, univ admins want institutional prominence as determined by familiar metrics, students want credentials for jobs, and faculty want support for their individual research and their local disciplinary interests (e.g. support for their department, program, center, etc.). The strategic plan then becomes a language game where everyone tries to get terminology into it that will fund them down the road. 

And maybe that's all a strategic plan can be or should be. So when the university asks what should we be doing, it's a strange question. How do you answer in something that isn't really a version of "more of the same"?  Or worse something like "those people over there should be defunded and you should give me their money"?

I'm less interested here in the particular vagaries of UB's mission than I am with the rhetorical practice of institutional strategy building. How would you go about it? A couple things strike me.

• Most obviously one is not starting from scratch. So if you're making a 5- or 10-year plan, how much does one really imagine will change?
• Is there a kairotic moment for change? Sure, it's hard to find a department that believes it is well-funded. Everyone wants more so that they can keep doing what they're doing but bigger and better. But is there really a collective sense that we need to act differently?
• Pragmatically (or cynically) is a strategic plan a negotation among stakeholders? If so, what's strategic about it? Getting buy-in from faculty, admin, and staff for a few years?
• Is a strategic plan really a decision-making document or is it more like a PR strategy for how we will talk about ourselves?

To set aside all the skepticism of a universtiy strategic plan, I would say that one thing that it absolutely needs is a comprehensive plan for meeting the challenges of entering a digital age. In teaching, we need to figure out how to teach well online, build physical spaces that facilitate in-class learning with digital media, figure out how to teach in those spaces too, help our students develop digital literacies, and construct a network that will support all that. In research we similarly need to support faculty in transitioning to digital publication, determine how to evaluate new scholarly practices, and create digital infrastructure to support these activites. Perhaps more importantly we need to develop smart administrative practices that can make good decisions out of student data. This last one seems to me to be the real black swan for higher education. We think we know what student information systems should look like because we've been using them for years, but I really don't think we are prepared for the level of data that will become available.

Obviously these digital matters are just one potential part of a university's strategic plan, the part with which I am most familiar. I also recognize that it is an issue that many of my humanities colleagues find troubling. Does it make sense of the humanities to refuse responsiblity for teaching and researching digital literacy? That would seem like a dangerous gambit and yet taking responsibility would be difficult for many current faculty. This month on the Writing Program Admin list, faculty are hemming and hawing over handling laptops in the classroom. Put briefly, even the most experienced writing teachers are uncertain about addressing one of the basic features of contemporary life: we are online. And these are faculty who think seriously and often about teaching, who take up pedagogy as a site of research. What's the chance that other faculty are better off? How will such faculty be able to develop a strategic response to this challenge? Or do they imagine that 10 years from now they will still be sitting in the same classrooms, teaching the same courses, and asking students to "turn off" the same devices?

mathematics and evil

I'm finishing up an essay for a new collection on rhetoric and the digital humanities that looks at the usefulness of a speculative digital rhetoric for dh, specifically big data applications. One of the points of commonality between speculative realism and digital humanities has been their interest in advanced mathematics. This has been pointed out before (see, for example, Michael Witmore's piece on the Ancestral Text in the Open Access edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities). Clearly Meillassoux's work connects with set theory but one could also think of Bryant's interest in cybernetics, DeLanda's use of simulation, or Bogost's work with programming. The use of mathematics and computing has also been a common point of the critiques lodged against both fields such as Alex Galloway's piece in Critical Inquiry or Tara McPherson's in the Debates book. In both cases, and many similar critiques, speculative realism and digital humanities are guilty by association. The warrants in these arguments are that we know that object-oriented programming is a tool for capitalist domination and that advanced mathematics has been built to devalue the human race and exploit our suffering for the profit of the few. So all we have to do is demonstrate that speculative realism or digital humanities rely upon such evils to prove their own evil as well. 

Of course there is another possibility that suggests that mathematics is a powerful way of investigating the world and that our philosophies ought to account for it. In that case, part of the argument that mathematics is a powerful tool is that people who are in power use it; there's no point in denying that. What makes less sense is the argument that suggests that because a tool is powerful we shouldn't use it to understand the world. 

If we think about these matters historically, as these critiques often insist that we should, the arguments become even odder. If we were to look at critical methods that have long operated in the humanities such as psychoanalysis or Marxism, it wouldn't be difficult to recognize the role that nineteenth and early-twentieth century math and science played in the formations of those theories. Similarly, it isn't difficult to identify the importance of industrial technologies to the development of modern scholarly practices. It wouldn't be that difficult to establish that the math and science underpinning Marxism, for example, were also used to hegemonic and destructive ends. And yet, somehow, century-old math, science, and technology are acceptable in the humanities in a way that contemporary math, science, and technology are not.

I understand the argument that suggests the digital humanities are "under-theorized." I would think of the situation somewhat differently. New computational methods can always identify new relationships and patterns within data and interpreting those relationships and patterns is a second step that is perhaps necessarily going to be a little behind the first step. I don't know that our legacy critical theories are of much use in this regard. On the other hand, I think those who are willing to engage more openly with contemporary math, science, and technology, including speculative realists but many others as well, might be able to develop, in conjuction with digital humanists, ways of theorizing the ontological and epistemological status of computational analysis. For my own part in thinking about a digital speculative rhetoric, I think the role lies in understanding the rhetorical function of nonhumans.

Regardless, I don't really see the benefit in passing these blanket judgments on departments across the campus from the humanities building. It seems to me that this is where the real antipathy toward speculative realism and digital humanities begins. Mathematics isn't evil, though it can be used for evil purposes. Shakespeare was put to use in English departments to perpetuate an essentialist, anglocentric, patriarchal ideology but that doesn't make Shakespeare a servant of industrial capitalism that should be abandoned. What is really at stake here, I believe, is a matter of disciplinary authority wherein these methods are not beholden to extant theories. It is understandable that humanists would not want to become epiphenomena of math or neuroscience or simulations. The response has been to attempt to turn the tables by asserting all math and science is primarily historical and cultural. Speculative realism and digital humanities do something different by rejecting this divide in a Latourian move. I don't really see how this is evil. It's more like different, though its not suprising when different is mistaken for evil.